If the Bible is a guide to anything, it is surely not the liberation of women, and this is made clear from the very beginning. In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, God is said to fashion an entire world for the use and benefit of man. Light and darkness, water, vegetation, and a lush garden are all tailored specifically for Adam, God’s first human creation. Surrounded by natural beauty and abundance, Adam has but one prohibition: he must never eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Yet God had apparently overlooked something. Since He had created man as a social animal, it occurred to Him that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” So God creates all the wild animals and birds in the sky for Adam to name and adopt as useful companions.
But there was still a problem. God equipped Adam with anatomy and desires that even the most agreeable animal companions could not satisfy. So, almost as an afterthought, God performs His final act of creation, fashioning a woman from one of Adam’s ribs to serve as his “suitable helper.”
He might well have reconsidered. Disobedient and gullible from the start, Eve is fooled by a talking snake and deceived into eating forbidden fruit, sharing it with Adam, and thus condemning all humanity to sin and suffering. And although you might reasonably blame Eve’s creator—and wonder why an all-knowing God failed to foresee or prevent either the serpent’s deception or the woman’s gullibility—this supposedly all-loving deity instead reprimands Eve and curses her descendants:
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you (Gen. 3:16).
Eve was not the sole recipient of God’s wrath. Adam and his descendants received their own just deserts for being so foolish as to listen to a woman: a life of labor, toil, and, ultimately, death. Humanity has been paying the price ever since.
Such is the inglorious origins of human history, according to Judeo-Christian tradition. But the cynicism and misery foretold in the Bible is only just getting started. Things are about to get considerably worse for the descendants of Eve, with the pains of childbirth proving to be the least of their troubles.
As commanded in scripture, if a virgin woman is raped by a man, the man “shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver,” marry her, and never divorce her (Deut. 22:28-29). But if that same woman is caught being unfaithful to her rapist husband, the penalty is death (Lev. 20:10). In other words, the real victim of the sexual assault is the father, not the woman, who is nothing more than a mere piece of property—along with servants, oxen, and donkeys—not to be coveted by other men (see the Ten Commandment).
Women, as the chattel of men, must remain obedient, silent, and submissive. As scripture makes abundantly clear:
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety (1 Tim. 2:11–15).
Women are reduced, essentially, to vehicles of reproduction. As such, they are instructed to submit to their husbands “as the church submits to Christ” (Eph. 5:24). They are to remain silent in church, and “if they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” (1 Cor. 14:35). Women are not to think for themselves or hold property of even their own bodies. These are the proper domains of men—just as God intended, from the very beginning of creation.
This brief account of biblical misogyny should suffice as evidence that Western monotheism is man-made. It should also suffice as an explanation for the lack of female representation in the story of atheism presented thus far. It was hard enough, after all, for men to break through with heretical ideas in the ancient and early modern period; you can therefore imagine the barriers women had to overcome.
Which makes it all the more surprising that Mary Wollstonecraft was able to publish her masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792. An English writer, philosopher, and early advocate of women’s rights, Wollstonecraft argued that women were not naturally inferior to men but had been made inferior through inadequate education and social restrictions.
We’ve now seen where many of those restrictions originated. The Bible, unapologetically misogynistic as it is, continues to be a source—perhaps the chief source—of continued subjugation. The first few pages of scripture, after all, do not simply imply that women are inferior; they make the hierarchy explicit. God made women to serve men.
Wollstonecraft, in truth, was neither an atheist nor a religious skeptic. This shouldn’t be surprising; had she been openly heretical, she’d likely have been erased from history long ago, consigned to historical anonymity along with countless other freethinking women. She lived, after all, in an officially Christian society in eighteenth-century England. Yet she introduced an idea that would ultimately help liberate women from the tight grip of monotheistic religion: that women’s subordination was imposed not by biology, but by culture.
Men do, admittedly, have one biological advantage over women, on average: greater physical strength. “A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied,” Wollstonecraft wrote. “But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment.”
The elevation of physical beauty, fleeting by nature, above more enduring virtues carries a considerable social cost. Women taught to regard themselves as little more than ornaments for men are thereby condemned to “a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.” But when women are educated on equal terms with men, the benefits extend far beyond women themselves. An educated woman is better equipped to be a wife, mother, companion, intellectual, and citizen. The liberation of women, in other words, is not merely a matter of justice; it is a boon to society as a whole.
Wollstonecraft seized upon the Enlightenment’s most radical ideas and turned them against the very men who claimed to champion them. The Age of Enlightenment and the political revolutions it inspired in the eighteenth century rested on ideals of political equality and natural rights, challenging the tyranny of tradition and the arbitrary exercise of authority. It was therefore only a matter of time before women turned the language of liberty against their male oppressors, who championed Enlightenment ideals while denying them to half of humanity.
For Wollstonecraft, this much was clear: “that to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation of government, was a political phænomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain.”
If man was to be guaranteed natural rights as a rational creature—and women “partake with him the gift of reason”—then women must also be granted the equivalent rights to freedom of conscience, speech, and religion, as well as the right to an education, political participation, and the development of the higher virtues. As Wollstonecraft wrote:
Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice.
Women’s emancipation, in other words, unlocks the productive capacity of half the human race. Men may possess an advantage in physical strength, with exceptions, but there is no comparable evidence of an innate intellectual or moral superiority. Nor can the lack of achievement among a systematically repressed group be offered as evidence of that group’s innate inferiority. Once that fallacy was exposed, justice demanded that women be recognized as free and equal individuals, entitled to the same education and opportunities as men. The modern world is immeasurably richer for having done so.
It’s sometimes shocking to consider how far we’ve come from biblical times—when it was perfectly acceptable to sell your daughter into servitude (Exodus 21:7)—to the present day, where women, as of 2025, have won 68 Nobel Prizes across the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace, and economics.
Consider the example of Marie Curie. Had she “remained silent in church,” content to live as man’s property, she would have never helped establish the science of radioactivity—or become the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields. It makes one wonder how many female scientists, inventors, and pioneers might have emerged had biblical strictures not kept generations of women from pursuing their talents.
Women have since become exceptional scientists, leaders, writers, researchers, and teachers, despite the biblical prohibition to never “permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man.” Men and women are not identical, nor do they share identical interests, but there is no evidence that there are any intellectual fields in which women cannot thrive. Women should therefore remain free to determine the course of their own lives and careers, without prejudice or arbitrary restrictions. When individuals are free to develop their abilities and pursue their ambitions, both women and society benefit.
The alternative is a regression to the supposed “wisdom” of the Bible, which tells us that half the human race is slightly more valuable than cattle. So the next time someone praises the Bible as a source of moral wisdom, spare a thought for the countless women stripped of their very humanity in the name of God—and for Mary Wollstonecraft, who helped teach them to demand it back.
References and Further Reading
Nobel Prize Outreach. “Marie Curie.” NobelPrize.org. Accessed September 3, 2026. https://www.nobelprize.org/stories/women-who-changed-science/marie-curie/.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Dover Thrift Editions. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1996.